


Anything Reasonable

by scintillio_coll



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Complicated Female Friendships, F/M, Gen, Show Canon Compliant, aang/azula if you squint, meandering nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:27:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26740618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scintillio_coll/pseuds/scintillio_coll
Summary: It's like asking her to no longer have black hair, to be someone else’s daughter, to face those who wronged her and not lay waste to every inch of their lives until their losses measure equal with hers. Freedom is worthless if she has to walk out of her cell as anything less than the person who went in.“What life?” she nearly screams, “What life are you offering me?”-Azula makes tea and compromises.
Relationships: Aang/Azula (Avatar)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 138





	1. no more gentle than before

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you gotta do it yourself. 
> 
> and by 'it,' i mean 'azula's redemption arc.'

It has to have been hours. The shadows crisscrossing the courtyard have stretched from spiked triangles to ash-gray ribbons.

Her brother and the Water Tribe peasant are one hollowed out silhouette against the glare of the setting sun, their whispers accompanying the soft clink of the chain wrapped around her wrists.

The only other sound is a strange feral growl that’s coming from her throat. 

The quiet confirms bad tidings. Her forces are not storming the gates, she will not be crowned, and her father is somewhere across the sea, probably crumpled in defeat under the heel of a grinning child. She sees these things with a distant sort of clarity, like how she always knew how a book would end halfway through. This plot, though, she can’t make it feel real enough to care. 

There were once so many who’d have come for her, razed cities in her name (would you call those people _friends_?), she almost regrets banishing most of them. 

Her throat burns, her knees ache, blood drips from her wrists, but it’s all so far away. Once this turn of bad luck has passed and finally the throne is hers (built of blue flames and her brother’s bones, she decides) she’ll look back on this moment and laugh.

She focuses on tangled strands of hair as Zuko inches into her periphery, circles on light, cautious feet around to one side, Katara to the other. 

“Azula,” he pleads, “It’s over.”

 _Never,_ she tries to say, but the sound she makes is more desperate animal than princess.

As she’s encased in ice, she swears she sees Ursa’s robes twist beside her. 

*

She listens to the words that float by with detached attention. Something about her sharp nails, her broken fingers, the names she screams in the night. 

There are drugs in her food, or in the water, or more likely both. She remembers sleeping only because she remembers waking, but it feels like the same, never-ending, nauseatingly boring day every time she opens her eyes. One continuous slog where the light at the end of the tunnel ends up being the white-washed hospital walls. 

She manages rare flashes of lucidity, the wet pressure clogging her thoughts shifts an inch and she remembers her name, how much it means, the power it owes her. Smoldering embers of rage catch again, lightening itches just below the skin and she hears that wild creature lodged in her throat shriek, thrashing hysterically until the half-healed wounds on her wrists break open again. 

But before she can gather the splinters of sanity into something thick enough to grip, the blank four walls close in like frozen waves, blinding with sterile light that has no source. 

The air is stale. 

She lays in the bed, she sits in a chair, she swallows what’s forced in her mouth.

Still, it’s easy to identify the voices gathered behind her seat- the nurse with graying hair, the man with half-moon glasses, Zuko’s clipped cadence, and her traitorous rat of a former friend. 

Mai’s presence eats away at her like boiling water. 

“Her wounds are healing nicely,” the nurse informs them. 

“ _Hm_ ,” Mai hums. Body heat warms the nape of Azula’s neck and she has the will to jerk her head around to bite the wretch’s belly, but tragically not the strength. “I guess you _can_ do something nicely.” 

Unseen hands rake firmly through her hair and all Azula can do is clench her fists until her fingernails pierce the meat of her palms. 

Her older brother murmurs something too low to hear, her vision blurs as her eyes water from the brightness of the walls and absolutely not from tears.

“Is my father dead? 

Mai’s hands falter, just once, as she pulls Azula’s hair into a simple topknot, like she used to when they were children and she pretended to love her. 

“No,” Mai answers in a tone that’s flat even for her, “Not yet.” 

*

She remains in the hospital and the hospital remains a dazed blur. People arrive, people leave, the voices change but the white walls are a constant. The only measure of time is the growing weight of her hair when it’s pulled atop her head and the meandering limp of half-coherent plots.

Sometimes she’s convinced years have gone by. That the skin of her face is sagging and loose and her hair has greyed like cinders after a fire. She demands to see a mirror and when that is refused she howls for her brother and when he doesn’t come she tries to fold herself into something so small it can escape through the cracks in the floorboards. 

The nurse says she’s getting better, but no one ever told her what was wrong with her in the first place. She says she’s stopped screaming in her sleep, eats without being forced, hasn’t attempted an attack in weeks. Was she attacking people? Sometimes there are blood stains under her fingernails, but it could always be her own. It’s so hard to grasp onto a tangible memory, know anything for sure beyond the ache in her wrists where phantom chains are still wound. 

“He’ll want to move you soon,” the elder woman informs her, wiping her body down with a damp sponge and practiced indifference. 

Azula doesn’t ask who ‘he’ is- brother, father, Avatar, uncle, what does it matter? She spent her whole life being perfect for men born with more power than her and _still_ ended up here.

She’ll have to finish it herself. 

_Finish what exactly?_ but that thought flits away. 

She giggles at the absurdity of it all. It doesn’t sound right. The nurse frowns on her way out. 

*

“You have to _hurry_ ,” she hissed at Ty Lee, jerking impatiently on her hand. They wound easily through the dusty twilight avenue created by the succession of heavy, ancient tapestries and the smooth, stone corridor walls.

Ty Lee squeaked, stuck her tongue out, but picked up the pace regardless, their feet lightly tapping out the secret route to her grandfather’s chamber, “You only do this because you’re not supposed to.” 

“If you’re going to be stupid, at least be _quiet,_ ” Azula sneered. Her parents were tall, it followed that she might be too. That meant it was only a matter of time and inches before she’d be too big to travel unnoticed through her personal passageways. She’d already eavesdropped on enough war-councils to know you must _always_ press your advantages, throw your entire weight against your leverage. 

She stopped short as louder and more intentional footsteps sounded from around the corner, clapped her free palm over Ty Lee’s mouth to muffle whatever complaint was probably on its way, and focused all her attention on the voices approaching. 

Her mother’s speech came through first, not yet intelligible, subdued and flat like it usually was when she spoke to her husband. The other was short and disinterested, which was how Ozai spoke to everyone.

It didn't sound like an argument, not exactly, shading closer to neutral than full-blown enmity. That was about the best she could have hoped for. In Azula’s short life she had never witnessed a conversation between the two that was particularly happy. 

She inhaled sharply and held her breath as they passed their hiding spot, the exchange finally penetrating the tense hush. 

“…should be proud,” Father said dismissively. 

“Ozai, her _behavior._ I can’t help but worry,” Ursa whispered. “It’s not…normal. She’s so different from Zuko.” 

Ty Lee’s distressed eyes found hers in the gloom.

Her father chuckled darkly, his words already fading as they moved away, “And isn’t it wonderful?”

Azula’s grip on the other girl’s hand tightened until she felt something pop, but Ty Lee didn’t let go. 

*

One day she wakes without being sure she slept, all groggy, still drugged, and aching as she stretches tight muscles and her eyes struggle to focus in alien darkness- they’d adapted like an animal to the varying yet constant light of the hospital.

Her gaze is drawn to movement as a skylight appears overhead, the ceiling peeled back in thin slits. 

Natural light filters down to illuminate her new home- a doorless, windowless cell of solid stone, a narrow, deep shaft of a room sixty feet deep.

By the time the sun’s rays complete the journey to her upturned face, catching on the dust motes drifting in and out of shadows, the heat is anemic and dim. It’s weak, but it’s real, and it’s the closest to the sun she’s been in so long, yellow instead of white and it shades her skin the palest of pinks. A bloom of pleasure swells in her chest regardless of how muted it is, and she grins, swaying drunkenly on the balls of her feet. 

She tries to remember through the fog the last time she felt anything so close to contentment. Can’t begin to imagine what brought it about. 

She was probably hurting someone, she used to smile a lot when she did that. Or maybe anticipating it, like the giddy excitement that danced through her limbs on the way to Boiling Rock. But it’s hard to say if that was joy in the strictest sense, or just the feeling that came along with telling Father she’d done her job and done it well.

The theme of consistency established at the hospital continues. Like clockwork, at three times a day that can be tracked by how the shadows slip along the scuffed walls, food and water slide through a channel that appears in one corner. The goods seem free of extra chemicals, but she’d been pumped full of so many unknown substances it takes almost a week for her body to expel them all. In those first days, she sleeps terribly, sweats constantly, vomits occasionally while her brain and organs and skin fight to return to the off-kilter stasis that’s at least her normal. 

Her thoughts still skip between cracking whip fast anger and gauzy, apathetic jumbles. She runs a rag over her clammy neck as her mother makes comforting _shh_ sounds in the corner behind her. 

After a few days her mind clears enough for the reality of her new situation to set in with dull, abstract despair. The plot is depressing, she doesn’t care for it, and even at the times when her brain is more machine than ghost, she has no idea how this particular storyline will play out.

If she could just get to her father, if someone would point her in a direction and let her off her chain, if only her friends had feared her _more._

The first time she takes a deep breath that doesn’t rattle her chest or turn her stomach, she summons a flame to her palm. 

It burns orange and she screams until she runs out of air. 

*

The worst part is being alone. 

It’s a completely unfamiliar state of being. She had always assumed she needed no one but never had to _prove_ it. 

Even after Mother left she still had Zuko and even after Zuko left she almost had Father and even after Father…

Well, that’s when she started to lean heavily on her friends. In the end, they had each proved it was a mistake to rely on someone, anyone, depend on anything except her own stubborn will. 

Tracing the events of the past year, it’s impossible to say if her breakdown was delayed by their support or ushered in by their betrayal. The answer is probably significant, but she doesn’t see the point in thinking of it while wasting away in a pit. Instead she tells herself that she doesn’t miss them so often it becomes more or less the truth.

She paces a lot, tests how far she can bound up the sheer walls with just the strength of her legs (halfway), then again with fire propelling her (close enough to the top that her howls echo after she falls). She does push up with two arms, one arm, hand stands and fire squats. The activity helps calm her mind enough for more rational thinking, it allows relatively linear plans to form as she lines up dashes along one wall to count the days. 

They all still begin with _get out_ and then _find Father_ , assuming he’s even alive _._ After that it’s mostly cataloging the people who need killing- Mai and Ty Lee constantly trade places at the top the list, her brother a close second, and the rest of the world a tie for third. She fantasizes about building a prison even deeper and more miserable than her own and tossing them all to the depths of it. 

The image makes her laugh, even if she’s still unsure if that’s the same as being happy.

The soot marks count out a month’s worth of tallies when the space to her left shakes and groans. With a deep _snap_ , a skinny tunnel looking into a similar stone chamber opens, framing her uncle’s face. 

Her lips remember how to quirk with arrogance even if she feels none. She would very honestly rather set herself ablaze than show him the excitement simply looking at another person ignites. 

“Uncle,” she drawls.

He nods towards her, “You look better, child.” 

He must have seen her at the hospital, so if her appearance has improved it’s not much of a compliment. She jerks her hands down to her hips from where they’d migrated to smooth her hair. 

There has to be a way for her to play this, steer the conversation, exploit Iroh into acting to her advantage, but her mouth speeds away from strategy and blurts, “I want to see my father.” 

She tries to remember and rank her goals, but her mind obsessively chants _get out get out get out._

Iroh shakes his head, “That will not be happening, Azula.” 

“My brother then.” 

“The Fire Lord is quite busy-“

A manic cackle cuts off the rest of his sentence.

Zuzu is Fire Lord and it’s the funniest, most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard. 

Iroh waits for her to quiet before tossing a small bundle through the channel towards her, “I brought you something.” 

Inside are pouches of tea- jasmine and ginger and even white jade, she sorts through them with an eye roll, “A least it isn’t a doll.” 

Her uncle purses his lips at that, seems almost regretful. 

“I did not try very hard to understand you, did I, Azula?” 

She drops the gift to the ground and shoots a yellow and red fireball through the hole. Her mother scolds, y _oung lady!_ and the passage crashes shut. 

*

Her uncle continues to come with his little belly and sincere smile, but not often. She might find a pattern to his visits if she bothered to study the scorched dashes that count the days. At around fifty he brings her a pillow. At one hundred he leaves a chunk of rock candy. She’s been rotting at the bottom of the hole nearly half a year when he gifts her a metal comb and she feels something buckle in her chest. 

And tea, always more tea. 

“It’s funny,” she giggles at him early one evening, the light in her cell already dimming, “Zuko used to only have you. And I had…well, everyone else.” 

The look he gives her is unimpressed as he slides her dinner within arm’s reach, “And now _you_ only have me.”

“No, Uncle,” she pouts a little, accepting the plate gracefully, “I have no one at all.” 

*

Once, only once, the window opens and the waterbender is there. 

They stare at one another in a silence that’s as unfriendly as an ice floe before the other girl finally shakes her head and scowls. 

“I don’t care,” Katara says stubbornly, “I don’t care if you’re insane.” 

*

Azula was a strong swimmer, had always taken effortlessly to physical pursuits. When her body was in motion, the constant buzz in her brain seemed to wane, the frantic, taut need to _do,_ to _act,_ loosened the barest bit. 

As a toddler, her cousin Lu Ten had floated beside her, one wide hand supporting her back as she drifted in the shallows off Ember Island, the sun’s rays a rosy glow in her chest and beyond her eyelids.

When they were older, she’d sneak through Zuko’s open balcony doors, as fluid and untouchable as the wind coming off the ocean, and drag him through the shadowed hallways and out onto the monochrome, moonlit beach. He was so nervous then, gangly and sullen and too proud to admit he was afraid as he followed her into the black, choppy surf. 

They’re some of the only memories that she’s pretty sure are happy. 

But after Katara leaves, the only thought Azula’s whirring and writhing brain can obsessively spin around and clutch onto is that the last time she was submerged was with her.

Katara had lowered her hands somberly and the water fell away and so did Azula, dropping like dead weight to her knees and fragmenting, breaking apart in uneven chunks as if the whole of her was actually ice, too. 

She gets so lost in that memory she almost incinerates the few simple objects she’s allowed- the cot, blankets, latrine, two books of Air Nomad history (someone’s sick joke), and the small, leaky wooden bowl she’s been so lowered to wash with. 

Yellow and red flames inch up the walls before the palace courtyard fades away, the sight of them turns her numb, and she snuffs them out.

*

The marks number close to 300 and take up a large portion of one wall. Her eyes lose focus when she stares at it for too long, sees figures and faces and foreign words if her gaze skips over it too quickly. 

She’s still working out a more elegant system of recording the days when the tell-tale vibrations off to one side warn her of an impending visit. She glances at the dashes again, can’t decide if she’s due more tea. 

But it’s not Iroh. 

He looks immaculate and ragged at the same time, this new Fire Lord. Tired and stiff and pale but, she notes with a pang of approval, not a hair out of place. 

She vaguely wonders at her own appearance, she’s still not allowed a mirror. But that’s far down on her list of grievances when compared to sedition. 

For all the times she’s found humor in her brother’s ascent to power, now she can only swallow and blink. She casts around for, at the very least, hatred, but her chest has suddenly gone quite cold. 

“I should have come sooner,” he begins. 

She forces her teeth to unclench, “Yes, very rude, Zuzu.” 

He flinches, and she pretends it’s at the nickname and not her hoarse voice.

“Are you alright?” 

She tilts her head at him with a look that says _seriously?_

He huffs, “Is there anything you need…anything reasonable?” He tacks on the final two words with a fleeting grimace. 

She misses her bed, choosing her own food, the splash of warm, scented water over her scalp. She’s desperate for direct sunlight, fresh ash bananas, the smell of mud and cherries and seawater. 

She waves her hands to the four bare walls, “I have everything a girl could want.”

If he thinks she’ll stoop to begging him for creature comforts, he’s got another thing coming. 

He takes a deep breath while she studies him further. He’s different from the last time she saw him, even more so from the handful of times before that. The self-loathing that colored his temper on Ember Island has been recast into a rigid spine, the uncertainty of childhood receding before newfound restraint. 

Is this the kind of Fire Lord he’ll be, a diplomat in place of a conqueror?

“We should talk about our father,” he closes his eyes briefly as if to brace himself.

 _He’s dead,_ she thinks, _Mai lied._

Instead, he speaks in halting sentences about the day the comet came, a battle on the other side of the sea. He weaves a story so absurd she almost can’t follow it, incredulity seething from every inch of her.

“You’re saying that ridiculous _child- “_

“He’s the Avatar,” Zuko mutters.

“Somehow removed the _bending_ of the strongest man in the world-” 

“Azula…”

“And you expect me to believe that? Just because everyone thinks I’m insane-”

“You _are_ insane,” he cuts in. 

She scoffs, can’t stop her fingers from anxiously straightening her clothes while she considers if what he says could be true. _Impossible!_ If it were, if the Avatar had the means to permanently disarm his enemies, she would be the obvious next-

“But you wouldn’t…” Panic begins to creep its way up her throat, drowning her on dry land like the day she lost. “You wouldn’t do that to _me_.”

His shoulders curve the smallest bit, “It’s been discussed.”

Her jaw snaps shut, her options are either silence or begging. But the vaguely familiar sound of a distressed animal leaks from her throat anyway. 

“I could never let you out otherwise!” The stoic diplomat rakes his fingers through his hair in frustration, ruining its perfection, to finally reveal her desperate brother, “Azula, I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life in this hole!” 

It's like asking her to no longer have black hair, to be someone else’s daughter, to face those who wronged her and not lay waste to every inch of their lives until their losses measure equal with hers. Freedom is worthless if she has to walk out of her cell as anything less than the person who went in.

“What life?” she nearly screams, “What life are you offering me?” 

The uneven skin below his left eye glimmers and she all but gags on her disgust, that he’d actually _cry_ for her, that he still cares enough. 

He signals to someone unseen and she’s staring at a wall again. 

*

“I’ll die first,” she swears to the dark, her skylight closed up and her cell static.

 _Don’t say that_ , her mother admonishes gently. 

*

Iroh visits once more. He grants her a smile but it’s the subdued version. He offers her no jolly anecdotes, is void of idealistic wisdom. 

“It’s funny,” she muses again, “Father was never even supposed to be Fire Lord.”

He passes her tea leaves with more care than usual, ritual in every motion, eyebrows gathered in grey thoughts. 

“Neither were you, Azula.”

She should ask if the judges outside her deep, hollow world have reached their verdict, if her fate has been sealed. Perhaps the Avatar is lurking just out of sight, ready to hold her down and strip her of the power she was born with like her brother stripped her of the power she’d been given. 

She doesn’t though. It’s not cowardly, she rationalizes, it’s just not real if she doesn’t let it be. 

*

That night she brews herself a cup tea. The flavor is familiar but hard to identify, dusts up hazy associations.

She’s already slumping onto her cot when she realizes it tastes like her food in the hospital, the drugs weighting down her senses like wet sand. 

“You miserable old fool,” she curses her uncle before the darkness wins. 

*

She has the strangest dream of flying. 

*

One eye cracks open, but only for an instant. The glare forces her to pinch it shut again, blinking rapidly. The light of the sun, even as it winnows its way through the maze of branches and leaves above her, is too bright after months and months below ground. 

She takes a quick breath and checks in with her other senses. She’s outside, that much is immediately obvious. Her throat is dry with thirst but not uncomfortable, no more than after a deep sleep. The air smells like dirt and moss, and as she presses her heals down anxiously, they sink into soft soil. Most importantly, she can hear the patter of waves nearby. She nearly shakes with excitement. Freedom is close, if she can just make it to the water, submerge herself below the surface.

She flexes her hands, they’re bound by a rope. It feels thick but definitely not unbreakable as long as - 

“Finally!” a vaguely familiar voice chirps above her, “I was starting to wonder if I needed to heal you.” 

With a squint she peers up, scanning the canopy before spotting the Avatar sitting lotus position at the end of a wide bough. Grinning. 

Like he’s just happy to be there.

Idiot. 

He unfolds, pale and boneless, hops down and lands light on his toes, aided by the tiniest flick of airbending. He’s grown taller in the year and change since the eclipse, the last time she laid eyes on him, is maybe about level with her height now. He was a compact child, but the growth spurt has stretched him into knobby knees and sharp elbows. 

His voice is different too, although there’s a lag between the observation and understanding exactly why. For people whose lives had revolved around each other for so long, she’s only seen the boy a handful of times and spoken to him even less. His tone had always been textured, but the grooves are more pronounced now. Raspy consonants lower and vowels crack slightly with full blown puberty. 

Those absurd ears still stick out like the sails on his glider, but overall time hasn't been cruel, the hints of a handsome man are there. The waterbender must be so pleased she didn’t shackle herself to a future with an armadillo bear. 

As nice as it is to see another person, his presence makes things more complicated. She realizes there’s no time to come up with a plan. She’ll think of something when she hits the water. 

Her legs obey their orders and kick out from under her to spring up smoothly. The prideful part of her chafes at showing him her orange flames but more of her is instantly relieved by the sight of them. Even with her wrists trussed tightly she manages to spray the Avatar and the tree behind him with a thick rush of fire. 

Her feet pivot naturally, ready to sprint full tilt into the trees, but as the flames cease, she realizes the spot where she’s aiming is empty. Instead a yellow, orange, and blue blur sails overhead, vaulting soundlessly and seamlessly to her side. 

His fists move too fast for her eyes to track but she knows the pattern they make with sour intimacy. 

_Turncoat,_ her brain hisses at Ty Lee as she drops with all the grace of a corpse.

His expression is untroubled as he crouches over her, slicing the rope from her wrists with a precisely aimed air blade and a shake of his head, “C’mon, Azula, don’t be like that.” 

“You didn’t take my bending?” she pants in disbelief, “You’re even dumber than my brother.” 

His smile shades a tad contrite and he runs one hand over his shaved head. “Would you believe me if I said it’s actually pretty hard to do?” 

The laugh that erupts out of her is rabid- heaving chest and limp limbs making for a disturbing picture on the forest floor, “No.”

He mutters something under his breath that could be ‘ _yeah yeah yeah’_ as he steps softly away and into the trees, mood reading more indulgent parent than discomfort.

He returns a short moment later, drops a stuffed-full pack onto the ground beside her.

“Do you know how to fish?” he asks.

“Excuse me?” 

He shrugs, “I’ve never done it, so I can’t give you any tips. But Sokka does it all the time so…” he trails off, smirk back, “…can’t be too hard to figure out.” 

She snarls out a wave of sparks that he’s already dodging before they’re totally out of her mouth, “Careful! There’s books in there!” 

“Where are we? What’s going on?” she spits, confusion and indignation overpowering fear. It makes no sense, if he was going to steal her bending, why drag her out to who knows where, with no audience, no witnesses.

He cocks his head, eyes darting from her to the trees, steps over her, and says mildly, “Think of it as a…compromise.” 

She growls as he hooks his hands under her armpits and begins to drag her, as if the moment couldn't get any more humiliating, “I don’t really _do_ compromises.” 

He’s silent for a moment while he props her against a tree trunk and squats so they’re eye to eye, giving the conversation at least the semblance of normalcy, “And I have the scar on my back to prove it.” 

The comment makes her pause, the perpetual buzzing in her head fading a touch as she rifles through her memories. 

That’s right, she _killed_ him once. How very peculiar that she had nearly forgotten. She suddenly remembers the panicked, stricken horror on Katara’s face, how it conflicted so wholly with the smile on hers. She pushes both images away. More things that cease to be real if she refuses to let them, the half-remembered plot of a book read long ago. 

“There has to be an easier way to get rid of me,” her head lolls against the bark, “Am I being abandoned in the wilderness to starve?” 

“No one thinks you’ll starve, Azula,” he arches one eyebrow.

“Repent then.” 

He snorts, “No one thinks you’ll do that either.” 

“Then why not just…let me go?” she drawls.

He straightens, rises over her and crosses his arms, “What would you do? If we cut you loose? What would you do first?” 

There’s no lie that can sound half as believable as the obvious truth. 

“Where…am…I?” she demands again. 

His smile drops for the first time, his grey eyes losing their good humor. The air goes heavy, humid and charged with something unseen as gravity pools around them. He looks the same, but if she were to close her eyes, she’d swear something much larger than a teenager was standing before her. 

It’s the Avatar, she decides, her first glimpse of the being instead of the boy. 

“Somewhere you won’t worry people,” he traps her gaze. “And you won’t make me kill you.” 

* 

The cell smelled like salt, the sweat and tears and blood dripping from the Kyoshi Warrior’s face trickling down to mix in the hollow of her trembling throat. She panted, her chest rattling louder than the chains that linked her hands and feet. 

“We can stop any time,” Azula murmured sweetly, tucking the other girl’s hair behind her swollen ears, “It’s not like I _want_ to hurt you.” 

Suki's laugh was wet, she leaned over to spit blood to the floor before letting her head roll back weakly. 

“I bet you have no idea _what_ you want,” she accused.

*

He’s been gone long enough for some pin-prick sensation to return to her extremities, the distant bellow of that sky bison her only goodbye. She deigns to awkwardly hoist herself back up and begins to sort through the pack. 

It contains: two shirts, two pairs of pants, five sets of underthings, one set of bedding.

A machete, two knives (one long and serrated, the other short and dagger-like), half a dozen fish hooks, fishing line, thicker twine, a spool of thin metal wire. 

Her two books on Air Nomads along with another on the history of Omashu, a sack of rice, packets of seeds, packets of tea, a deep copper pan, one iron kettle. 

And at the very bottom, wrapped in sturdy hair ribbons, the comb her uncle gave her. 

It only confirms that wherever she is, she’s meant to stay. 

She stomps a few times, shakes her feet out, and trudges west towards the sound of the sea, reaching a sloped, steep shoreline within a matter of minutes. 

She backtracks to the bag, heads east this time, annoyed when she quickly finds the same, her suspicions all but confirmed. 

“An island?” she muses, repeating the process but now heading south. It’s not a bad idea, she understands why they might think it can hold her. 

But it’s only a matter of time. The sun will unfailingly tell direction and she knows enough about the night sky to orient herself on the face of planet. She considers the trees that she’s winding through, there’s plenty of material to build a small craft, plot a course for the mainland, whether that’s the Earth Kingdom or home.

_Get out, find Father, reclaim everything that’s been snatched away_

It’s more of a plan than she’s had in over a year. 

Hacking a path through the vines with her new machete and ruby flames, she clears the tree-line for the third time. She looks out over the coast and is paralyzed by sudden bewilderment, logic competing with what she’s so sure she’s seeing. 

Wake. The island leaves behind a rippling trail as it _moves._

“I _am_ insane,” she reminds herself, still fixating on the bubbling waves. 

But the next morning, the east side of the island is now the north and she doesn’t know what to believe. 

*

With a deep inhale she tightens the vine knotted around her torso. Despite her uncertainty, resolve percolates in her belly, and she takes strength from the overwhelming warmth of the sun, before launching as far out into the sea as she can. 

The water is cool, and her mouth curves into an honest grin at the sensation of being wholly enveloped, even as a myriad of unknown cuts light up with electric stings. She welcomes it, feels it burn the past months off of her. 

A few forceful strokes propel her forward until the tether tugs taut. 

She kicks into a turn, shoulders following her hips as she pivots against the rolling pressure of the sea, her hair dragging behind her. The saltwater makes her eyes burn as she opens them, attempts to take in the scope of her newest prison. 

In the blurry, murky depths, something moves. She catches the briefest glimpse of what looks like an enormous golden eye, truly horrifying in size, before the water churns violently around her. She gasps as something snags at the back of her shirt, sucking in a chest full of water as she’s hauled violently into open sky.

Air rushes by as she’s swung and dropped, soaking wet and screaming in terror through the trees, landing with a painful _thump_.

Lurching over to retch salty water and bile all over the ground, twigs and rocks digging uncomfortably into her knees, she desperately gasps for air and wonders if instead of getting better, this is the craziest she’s ever been.

 _I was asked to keep you_ a voice with no point of origin worms its way into her brain. 

Keep her _what?_ she thinks frantically. _Alive? Well? Contained? Sane?_

 _Just keep you_ it says.

*

_Do you remember Uncle’s stories about the lion turtles?_

“Be quiet,” she hisses, “Go away!”

Ursa’s shadow hovers just beyond the ring of firelight. 

_You’ll be alone_

A breeze passes silently, the fire flickers and her mother’s robes sway. 

“That didn’t matter when you _left_ ,” Azula snarls, turning her back. 

Ursa is still there when she falls asleep. 

*

The water rippled as the family of turtle ducks paddled calmly in the center of the pond. They had begun to approach the shore as she’d settled against the tree trunk, but never quite made it. Either they knew she hadn’t brought any bread or they recognized her from years of malicious rock lobbing. 

“You’re right!” she yelled to them half-heartedly, plucked a blade of grass and crushed it between fingertips. “I’m not him.”

The oddest part of her brother’s absence was she found herself thinking about him way more than when he was actually present. She asked herself about his wound when she awoke in the morning and had no one’s bedroom to slink into. As she was summoned to her lessons, her eyes flitted to his empty seat and she wondered how it had healed. 

_Was it a scar, had he lost the eye, would his hair grow back, did the pain keep him up at night?_

Bizarre questions for someone she swore she didn’t even miss. 

But the strangest, by far, was simply, _where was he?_

It clung to her, a sound so constant she couldn’t hear it anymore, the thought that he could be absolutely _anywhere_. 

“You wouldn’t even recognize him,” she muttered darkly to the animals. The words twined with the echo of Zuko’s screams ricocheting out from her brain and around the courtyard. 

She uprooted a fistful of grass this time and frowned like the child she told herself she’d never been. It wasn’t sympathy she felt, but it wasn’t disdain either, which was what she was used to. Not really mean-spirited, but not compassionate. It merely felt weird that, after an entire lifetime spent as a mismatched set, she had no way of knowing.

Her clenched fist struck the ground. 

It wasn’t _fair_. 

With one foolish choice, he had tossed a boulder into a calm pond, creating an invisible wrinkle of repercussions that had decided the fate of them both. Getting himself banished had left her alone to walk the thin line between Father’s praise and wrath and the growing knowledge that those were sometimes the same thing.

She had her suspicions that the inverse was not true, that Zuko did not dwell on her. He probably never spared a thought to who she complained to or ate with or beat at sparring. If his attention ever did limp her way, he could still be sure, at any given moment, of exactly where she was.

But no, Zuko would only be thinking of the Avatar. Some commoner. Some _stranger._

Azula may have gotten their father’s fierceness and cruelty and lust to dominate but Zuko had inherited something much more dangerous. The same sickness as so many men in their family, a plague on their very blood.

“Princess?” a servant timidly called from the walkway.

By then, his obsession with the Avatar would be so complete that it was bound to his breathing.

A smirk was set on her face before she’d finished rising.

To be honest, she’d probably hate them both for that forever. 

*

She builds a boat anyway. Fells a squat tree with carefully flicked discs of flame, hollows it out with white-hot coals. Sweat beads on her brow as she dumps the pack into the makeshift canoe and shoves off the rear with frantic, overpowering urgency. 

The leviathan’s claws are no more gentle than last time. It scoops her up only a few dozen yards out and dumps her once again onto its massive shell. 

She builds three more boats. Collects a dozen more cuts. Devolves into a cursing, shrieking creature caught with its paw in a trap, totally defenseless against the will of her colossal jailer. 

A guttural scream rips from her in one elongated, harsh note as she drops a fourth time. She crashes through the branches, about to meet the uneven ground before one catches under her right armpit and jerks her to a sudden stop. An incandescent pop of pain shocks her to silence as her shoulder dislocates, the limb holding for barely a second before it snaps and completes her fall back to land. 

She does nothing but breathe for a moment, each inhale ratcheting the hurt higher and higher. There’s no line between the physical agony and the tidal wave of frustration, the way her body rejects helplessness like a disease. It mixes with the loneliness she won’t acknowledge, her brother’s scarred face, her father’s figure fading, Mai’s fingers in her hair- until her eyes fill with tears. A sob splits her chest in two and every piece of her suffocates, ground down into something smaller and weaker and more wretched than what she was before as she chokes on an emotion she can’t name. 

Like experiencing happiness, she’d be hard pressed to remember the last time she cried. It was an action reserved for her mother. 

Tears are still streaking in hot streams down her cheeks when she finally forces herself up, rams her bones back into place against a tree trunk with animal wails and unsteady knees. She limps through the overgrowth in search of the pack, eventually finding it some distance away. Using one of her spare shirts she fashions a makeshift sling. 

She takes out one of the knives to carve a calendar on the side of a giant tree deep in the forest. Scouts out a flat spot for the garden. Gathers the splintered remains of her shattered boats and builds a hut. 

*

The time she used to spend having her hair done or intimidating servants is now spent in the tree tops, searching the horizon for a glimpse of land. She tells herself it’s so she can try to signal rescuers, but in reality the fishing is better in shallower seas. 

It’s harder and dumber and takes way more time that she thought possible, but she gets better at it. Especially after she begins to pretend it’s a battle, the hook her only weapon against a wily foe. The game makes dragging her small knife against shiny scales feel more like claiming a victory prize than a chore. She has to admit the Avatar knew what to say- her pride wouldn’t let her fail at something the Water Tribesman could do.

The garden proves harder. She’s literally never _nurtured_ anything. The mechanics seem simple enough, even if she only understands them in theory. With a sharpened stick she carves three deep furrows through the soil of a clearing and sprinkles a handful of seeds in, carelessly kicking the dirt back on top. 

Patience is not one of her gifts, and it lacks the instant gratification of fishing, so she mostly forgets about it.

_Get out, find Father, conquer everyone so she never has to feed herself again_

After two months nothing sprouts so she harvests seaweed instead.

*

“I brought presents!” the Avatar calls from the bison’s back, circling the treetops while the beast looks for a comfortable place to land, eventually disappearing below the canopy like a sinking ship. 

It unnerves her that she had no way of knowing he was approaching, yanks the comb through tangled chunks of hair and wonders if her uncle’s periodic tea deliveries have evolved into these unsolicited visitations. 

_You could have warned me,_ she pouts at the lion turtle, plucking up a ribbon. The creature at least acknowledges her complaint, the sensation it broadcasts into her mind something akin to raised eyebrows or a dismissive shrug as she lassos her topknot. It’s probably not perfect, but without a mirror she can only do so much. Instead she thinks about the calendar and its four months of notches, decides to add an extra notch beside today’s to mark the event. Maybe a symbol. Perhaps a little arrow.

She redirects her wandering thoughts to the present moment as the Avatar pushes through the greenery, pack slung over one shoulder and that chittering winged lemur circling his head. 

“I love what you’ve done with the place,” he waves a casual hand across the clearing, eyeing her barebones hut, fire pit, and the flat rock she had spent one entire afternoon cursing and sweating and scraping up her finger as she rolled it into camp so she can clean fish on it. 

“What a pleasant surprise,” she simpers. “I assumed the Avatar would be too _busy_ for harassing prisoners.” 

His disinterested _pfft_ snatches some of the righteousness buoying her attitude and he slings the pack to the ground, kneeling beside it, “It’s nice to see you too, Azula.” 

She feints apathy as he empties the haul- the same staple supplies as before with the addition of a box of iron nails, a pouch of salt, another of herbs, a book on Water Tribe mythology, half a dozen short ceramic cups, several ash bananas, a couple wax sealed scrolls, and happily, a fat block of soap. She nearly groans at the sight of it after weeks upon weeks of wading into the waist deep freshwater pools that dotted the shell’s surface and scrubbing herself down with sand.

“Well,” he says cheerily, tossing a large sack of rice towards the hut, “it’s rude to not greet your host.” 

With that he rockets upwards and away in the general direction of the lion turtle’s head. A handful of seconds later she swears she can hear a splash. 

The lemur looks momentarily torn, undecided between chasing his master and continuing to poke about Azula’s clearing. The stupid creature gets distracted by the fish scales that shimmer on the ground, tail whipping before clumsily pouncing at one. 

Ash bananas had always been among her favorite treats and she bites into one with gusto as she cracks open the wax seal on the first letter. Her uncle muses about his tea shop, the weather, the offhanded complaints of an aging body. It’s barely interesting, and reeks of the bald honesty that defines him.

Zuko’s distinct hand is instantly recognizable as she unfurls the second and she arches an eyebrow at the unexpected length of it. He uses an excess of words to say practically nothing, tells her in extreme detail of the most banal news from the palace: visiting dignitaries, new treaties, an underwhelming harvest, his hesitance to lower tariffs. While Iroh’s note was achingly genuine, this one reads as a memorandum to a business partner, a real highlight of the mundanities of leadership she’d actively avoided. Her interest is only piqued when he adds that their least favorite Fire Sage has finally kicked it. 

It’s not until she’s almost reached the end of the letter that her anxious older brother peeks through. 

_Are you alright?_ he writes, awkward concern radiating from every brush stroke. _Is there anything you need?_

“Anything reasonable,” she finishes for him with a cynical smile. 

She can almost imagine his face, hunched over at his desk, all screwed up and wound tight and riddled with insecurity. Unsure what kind of sincerity was a bridge and what kind was a bomb. 

It’s signed without titles, just a simple _Zuko._ She finds that oddly endearing. It produces the sweep of some light sentimentality under her breastbone with the reluctant reminder that he’d been her only partner longer than he has been her enemy. For most of their parallel lives he hadn’t been _exile_ or _traitor_ or even _Fire Lord,_ just Zuko- the boy who was already there waiting when she arrived. 

The twist in her chest edges close to regret when she catches sight of a short post script at the very bottom, nearly hidden by the curve of the paper’s edge. 

_Mai and Ty Lee are well._

With that, every opening in her shutters closed, the flutter of goodwill under her sternum collapses under the icy, dead weight of long-ignored reality. 

Her fingers clench, over the roar of blood pounding in her ears she can hear the paper rip. _Brother, sister,_ they’re just words, she reminds herself. Like _mother,_ like _friend,_ like _love_ or _family_ or _forgiveness_ or _freedom_. 

How stupid that she had once hated not knowing where, on the vast surface of their shared world, he was. Being sure is worse. 

_Do they ever wonder where she is?_

A shadow blocks out the sunlight that brightens the parchment and just as suddenly as his departure, the Avatar reappears. He drops from the sky with a spray of seawater, his simple clothes soaked and plastered to his body. 

“Something wrong?” he cocks his head, catching sight of the stormy expression on her face.

He steps closer, concern growing, grips her shoulder, “Azula?” 

She tosses her brother’s letter into the dirt between them with one hand, shoves him off with the other. The only thing holding back her flames is that the orange is still so _embarrassing_. 

The Avatar frowns, “Look, if Zuko said something stupid, he does that a lot, I get it- “

Back in the real world, living a real life, in her well-made clothes and immaculate hair, she would have taken a moment to craft her response. Pause to pick a turn of phrase the perfect papercut between whimsical and foreboding. 

But here, where she sleeps on the ground and eats with her hands and sees no one, not even her own reflection, what tumbles out of her mouth is entirely temper, all reflex. 

“You don’t. You _can’t!_ You’re the Avatar, you’ve been chosen since birth. You will never _ever_ not be chosen.” 

*

Her Uncle smiled serenely at her brother as the two of them walked casually through the simple Earth Kingdom village. Their conversation was distant and muddled from her niche in the shadows, but their faces were easy enough to make out. 

After three years of wondering, she was finally granted a glimpse at the damage their father wrought. The pink scar looked alive. It tripped its way up the side of his features, tangling with his left cheek and eye lid, ironically fading and leveling at the base of his ponytail. 

But what struck her as the biggest change, what curled the corners of her mouth into a grin that was all satisfaction and no pleasure, was the grim anger radiating off the whole of him. It made him look more like their father than their mother.

For once, it made him look like her.

*

“Why haven’t you taken my bending yet?” she husks after the tense, sharp-edged silence has lit her belly up with the irrational fierce need to fight or flee.

He purses his lips, “Would it make you less dangerous?” 

The moment the bison’s form fades into the clouds, she burns everything in sight, starting with the letter. 


	2. split right down the middle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s pretty sure she’s not, though. Sorry. Not in the way everyone seems to be waiting for, doesn’t even know how to get started. She did so much- set a million fires and betrayed a thousand trusts and gleefully twisted every arm she could until she got whatever she wanted. To begin to be sorry for even one of those things feels like the first loosening rock of an avalanche.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i read the wikipedia articles of what goes down with azula in the comics and thought, 'no, this will not do.'

It takes a few days for the heat of the fire to subside enough to dig through the ashes. She waits it out by pacing, floating in the pond, and rudely ignoring her mother as she hovers in her periphery.

Not much survives. The hut, the books, most of her spare clothes, even the salt had twisted, burned, crumbled, and blown away in the face of her suffocating rage. She manages to recover most of the nails, stomping her foot petulantly while bending the warped fish hooks back into something functional.

Her hands crack and bleed from the dry cinders and their leftover temperature as she swears in harsh sounds that never become words. Her mind’s eye travels home, to the echoing palace halls, the pristine gardens, and the long, shining dining table where she took her meals. She imagines her brother being dressed by servants and Mai eating those fancy fruit tarts and that arrogant waterbender with her bad style and holier-than-thou haughtiness in all the places she doesn’t belong.

_Get out, find Father, crawl into her warm, plush bed and sleep for a week_

A low hum of anger smolders like the remains of her shack, catching around the edges of a heavier feeling, overpowering the soft-spoken, reasonable part of her brain that says, since there is literally no one else around, the destruction can be no one’s fault but her own.

It’s that she’s never had to clean up her own mess before, face the consequences of bad behavior alone, and she does _not_ care for it. It used to be easy, simply walk away from the destruction she negligently wrought and decide it wasn’t real.

Under a corner of the hut’s collapsed roof is the comb. One end has melted into a solid and worthless blob, but the other half is relatively (thankfully) whole.

 _It could be worse_ , her mother reasons.

“How?” Azula grouses, but weariness has drained most of her usual bite.

The only thing completely intact, carelessly tossed aside at the edge of the clearing, is the nearly full bag of seeds.

Her uncle would find some deep meaning in that, but even thinking the thought is annoying, so she doesn’t dwell on it.

*

“You redecorated.”

She startles, arms wheeling slightly before she re-centers her balance and straighten from her crouch over the garden.

He’s smiling as he takes a lap around the clearing, already dripping water. He pokes his head into the new hut and drops the bag at the door before ambling her way.

The more glaring evidence of her tantrum has faded, the scorch mark on the ground and rocks washed away in rain storms, the blackened, charred stumps camouflaged by new growth. But it must be pretty obvious what took place, and she’s split right down the middle between chagrin and indifference.

The handful of months since he last came have been quiet. Every day she mourns the loss of the soap, sweating and grumbling as she cut down more trees, constructed a new home, and fitted rough handles on the knife blades.

With most of her food a charred ruin, she’d been forced to focus her attention and energy on the garden again. After a few circuits of the entire shell, arguing out loud with herself (and sometimes Ursa), she’d selected a half dozen new spots. Sun exposure was probably critical, also giving each seed its space, and actually watering them. In the morning she painstakingly gathers fresh water in her scorched tea cups and tips it onto the tiny mounds with begrudging, clumsy care.

Half her first crop dies in sad, prolonged stages, from neglect or incompetence, she’ll never know. But when after a few weeks the remaining spaces are dotted with miniature, curlicued green buds, she feels the same vain pride as when Fire Nation flags flew over Ba Sing Se. Father would have reminded her that it’s nothing to be proud of, not in comparison to her other, real accomplishments, but when she tries to scold herself in his voice, it’s difficult to recall.

“Whoa! Cabbage?” he guesses, leaning over the crooked rows.

“Lettuce,” she shoots for disdain but sounds a little pleased instead.

“And those?” he points to the limp vines propped up on a series of stakes just beyond.

“Long beans.”

He opens his mouth again, gesturing towards the cluster of immature gourds developing several feet away in the shade, but she stops him before she has to admit she has no idea what they’re called.

“What did you bring me?” she asks quickly, striding back to the bag and dropping beside it.

He shrugs, snaps a long bean off the vine and munches it while she glares, “You know I don’t pack those, right?”

She quickly pulls out rice, salt, dried mung beans, ubiquitous sachets of tea, fresh underthings, needle and thread, ripe ash bananas, more letters. She nearly wiggles in glee at the hunk of plain soap wrapped in wax paper.

“I saw a pod of manatee whales nearby, feel like going for a swim?”

She looks up from her brother’s predictably boring missive to peer at him skeptically. She’s not allowed to swim, can still feel the tightened skin around the scratches on her back even though they’ve long since healed. Her warden will probably allow it now that she has a chaperone, although she’d rather swallow a fishbone than admit it.

“No.”

He pats is pant legs, ridiculously, the fool doesn’t even have pockets, “Dice?”

“I have nothing to bet,” she snaps.

He smirks, undeterred, “Sparring then.”

One eyebrow quirks in surprise. He may be older, but he’s still a complete child.

“I’ll even let you pick the element.”

He’ll see her orange flames again but Azula's never been able to pass up the opportunity to prove herself to someone, can’t help pressing against an advantage with all her weight.

“Fine.”

*

She goes on the offensive immediately, leaping as high as her legs can manage and shooting a thick swath of fire that spans the distance between them. A twister of air spirals around her, extinguishing the attack, but she’s already landed behind him, forcing him into a sloppy duck to avoid a series of burning discs.

A buffet of wind bowls her over as he kicks out and rights himself with a full-throated laugh, so she lets the momentum force her backwards into deeper woods for cover. She retreats enough to draw him into a thicket of trees, before attacking again. For the first time, her intimate knowledge of her prison works to her favor, she knows every inch of the forest, has laid eyes on or tripped over or cursed at every root, rock, and furrow.

They weave through the trees in a rapid stutter of steps, occasionally close enough to exchange physical blows. A giggle bubbles out of her at his expression when a solid punch knocks him back a pace, his shocked grin matching hers.

She has no idea how long it carries on like that, both panting and shaking sweat from their eyes, each of her strikes fended off with quick burst of wind that robs her of balance at best, knocks her on her ass at worse. She can feel the lion turtle’s curiosity buzzing in the back of her mind, but it doesn’t intervene, honestly seems to barely care. The Avatar is still as nimble as she remembers, but his intensity has never been a match for hers. With one badly timed maneuver, she forces his strategy to veer purely defensive, more and more of his moves wasted on avoiding hers.

A particularly fierce wave of fire backs him into a tangle of vines, holding him in place while she’s too far away for any of his strikes to have much of an effect. She presses forward slowly, kicking a wave of sparks that are more distraction than assault, reveling in the aggravation that pinches his face.

Her arms wheel and link at the wrists, one final blast of heat bursting towards him, when a wall of rock shoots up between them, blocking it entirely. It startles her enough that she stops in her tracks.

“Cheater!” she yells at him.

The earth shield crumbles, the Avatar puffs behind it, “Jeez, you could have killed me!”

 _Again_ hangs silently between them as they both gasp for breath.

That’s always been part of the problem, hasn’t it? No one ever taught Azula when to stop.

“It’s not my fault you’re woefully out of shape.”

He glares for a moment, chest heaving, before a lightness passes over him like he just came up with a bright idea that she’s sure she will not like.

*

“No.”

“You’re not being very hospitable.”

“Leave!”

“No one else fights me as hard as you do!”

“I’m not going to help you!”

He looks around the clearing, his face softening from humor to something closer to sympathy, “Azula, it’s not like you have anything else to do.”

*

They fight again that afternoon, and the next morning, and the evening after that. He complains endlessly about his sore muscles and their singed clothes and her surly attitude, but deep down she thinks he enjoys every one of those things.

In between sessions he borrows her small knife to whittle a set of basic chance sticks. At first, they gamble using the round, shiny pebbles he stomps out of the ground but when it becomes clear that he’s totally hopeless at the game, she agrees to make the wagers more interesting. It’s mostly asking for fresh vegetables on his side, doing annoying chores on hers. With his bending, it takes him a fraction of the time to water the garden or gather armfuls of seaweed.

He naps under the same tree she first found him in while she completes the everyday rituals required to survive alone, his loose orange tunic a ball under his head and the lemur a ball on his chest. The sound of his breathing isn’t all that loud, but by now she’s so attuned to the waves, the birds, the bugs, her own movement, that anything extra is conspicuous. It’s almost nice to have someone else around, especially since she doesn’t care about impressing him, even when he tries to talk to her in the evenings.

They settle in front of the fire while she cleans fish or flips through the new books he brought, and he chatters. The subject of conversation is random- lemur training, metal bending, head shaving- but his circuitous train of thought always finds its way to one place: The hostile state of the world, and how worried it makes him.

How outrageous, that between his careless rambling and Zuko’s letters, she, prisoner and war-criminal, knows more about the secret, whispers-behind-a-drawn-curtain politics of their world than almost anyone else alive. It’s a little insulting, it just reminds her of how toothless they must think she is now.

“If you’d let my father win, you’d have your peace by now,” she taunts.

He cocks his head at her, “Oppression isn’t peace, Azula.”

“Maybe not the kind you’d prefer,” she concedes, “But people couldn’t start another war, even if they wanted one.”

“People don’t want war.”

“I didn’t mind it.”

He sighs, “You really aren’t as funny as you think you are.”

She idly flicks the seed husk on the ground beside her across the clearing, chuckling as the lemur skitters after it, “You can lead an ostrich horse to water, Avatar.”

He groans, “What’s your point.”

“You can’t tell people what to do. You either lead them and hope for the best,” she holds up one empty palm, “or you make them.” Her other hand raises, already burning.

“No third option?” he droops. She wonders if carrying around the Avatar spirit adds weight to him.

“You let me go and _I_ make them.”

A startled laugh bursts out of him and he shakes his head at her, unconvinced.

“See, I am funny,” she murmurs.

*

After two days he builds his speed back up enough to force her into a draw with air alone, whooping and spinning on an invisible breeze around the shallow pond he’s tossed her into.

She skulks behind a tree while he gathers up the few objects he’d brought with him, pretends not to notice when he swipes a couple strips of dried seaweed.

“You know, I’ve seen something like this before,” he gestures lightly towards her garden plots with one hand, scratching the lemur on his shoulder with the other. “Sometimes things grow better after a fire.”

 _He’s kind_ , her mother notes as he takes off on his fussy bison, an unreadable smile fixed on his face.

“He’s an idiot,” she mutters back.

*

Her hands ignite to burn away the smell of fish guts from her palms. She keeps them lit as she scoops up a handful of dry branches and tosses them into the fire-pit. The island is awash in the same oranges and yellows of her flames as the sun sets, reflecting a trillion sparks of light across the surface of the ocean.

The colors still chafe, a burn that won’t heal, saltwater on a splinter. Even when she’s not consciously thinking about it, so many of her dreams are blue.

“I don’t suppose you have any tips?” she asks the lion turtle. Its aura hangs constantly in the back of her head, but she only speaks directly to it during her lowest, loneliest, in-between moments.

She stares at her hands, the blood-red fire an unbroken chain stretching from one finger to the next, “Can you even hear me?”

 _You are loud_ it informs her.

*

The Avatar returns when the stars dotting the clear black night tell her they’re somewhere in the Eastern Sea, swimming slowly in the vast empty nothingness in between the Earth Kingdom and the South Pole. He brings more books.

“Soon you’ll be the most well-read island hermit in the world,” he muses with a smirk. It takes him three days to beat her with earth bending.

“There’s barely any dirt on here!” he gripes, full of excuses, wrapping her ankles in clay to halt an advance.

“If you mess up my garden I’ll kill you again!”

At about her one-year anniversary at sea he finds her in the warm green waters off Gaoling with a Pai Sho board, whetstone, and, unsettlingly, a letter from Ty Lee.

She writes about her older sister’s engagement with poorly contained exuberance, goes on about how boring the man is, that Mai sulked through the whole betrothal ceremony. On paper, same as in life, the circus freak is able to balance on a tightrope, simultaneously acknowledging the reality of Azula’s situation without pretending she’s sorry about it.

 _Try not to get too much sun_ , she warns at the bottom under a few tips on fish preparation she’d gleaned from the palace cooks.

Out of the three of them, the trio of teenage girls who recklessly cut their way into history with so little in common, least of all motivation, Ty Lee was the only one who could tell the truth without using it as a weapon. It’s another thing no one ever taught Azula.

“Are you alright?” the Avatar asks as she rerolls the note silently. It’s hard to say if it’s the question (it’s _always that question_ ) or the image of Ty Lee charming the Fire Lord’s kitchen-hands that drops acid into her gut. Either way, she feels raw and masochistic enough to fight him with waterbending.

He throws her into the pond on his first try, but he stays two more nights regardless.

In the summer heat off the coast of Omashu she discovers he’s outgrown her. Watches as he meditates in the cool autumn light near the Patola Mountains. She chuckles from a nest in the treetops while he wrangles iguana seals near Crescent Island, simultaneously the closest and farthest away from home she’s been in so long.

They still spar. The anticipation for their matches is the only thing that motivates her to stay in shape while she’s alone, looking forward to it more than new books or fresh ash bananas.

The long months alone are ever-shifting. Some weeks blend and melt together with nothing to distinguish one day from the next. Others are punctuated by bursts of anger, sadness, a dead kind of calm that unsettles her when she emerges on the other side of it.

She often forgets to keep up with her calendar for days at a time, so a true measure of her exile is impossible to know. There’s only the constant growth of her hair and the wear in her clothes, the dullness of the blades scrapped away with each harsh swipe of the whetstone.

Her dreams are blue, mostly, although lately many begin with one of Ty Lee’s sisters. The woman giggles and smiles at Azula before eventually morphing into Ty Lee or Mai or Katara or Suki’s bruised and bloody face.

Some nights she doesn’t asleep at all. Her mind gets caught in one of those twisting loops, stuck on the older girls they knew at the academy, the handmaidens who were around her age, the Kyoshi Warriors in their heavy green and gold robes. Who among them are married now? Are mothers? Are in love? How many are criminals, are healers, even survived the end of the war? She has no frame of reference for the innumerable ways their existence can have gone, can’t fathom all the places life can stumble when it hasn’t halted completely. Rolling forward, its momentum growth and constant, infinitesimal changes.

But Azula, Azula is stuck. Azula’s life is the sunrise and the sunset and the slow shift of the constellations overhead and the anticipation of another letter that says absolutely nothing.

The Avatar doesn’t always have a message from Ty Lee, but one is delivered often enough that her marked change in mood after laying eyes on the woman’s loopy, uneven handwriting must be apparent.

“Why are you so mad at them?” he asks, standing over her while she sharpens the knives, the raspy _shhh_ of the whetstone against metal so much like her mother’s low, comforting hums.

She pins him with a quick glare, “You must know about Boiling Rock.”

He nods, “But you can’t…you can’t forgive them for not letting you kill your brother?” He flicks his fingers and a steady breeze flows between them, cooling the sweat on her brow, “You have to be a _little_ glad they stopped you.”

Maybe she would be, if she wasn’t insane, if her mind walked a straight line and not a meandering maze where her actions are real, but the consequences aren’t.

She drops the stone, she doesn’t have the tolerance for both this conversation and the menial task, “They were there, you know. Every step of the way. I wasn’t alone in Omashu, or when we captured your friends from Kyoshi, or when Ba Sing Se fell. It was all three of us.”

The blade waves, pointing first at him and then to herself, “But look who’s here now. Just you and me. So why wouldn’t I be angry?”

“You don’t _have_ to be here,” his voice raises, it’s gratifying to see his patience with the topic is as thin as hers, “You still haven’t told me what you would do if you weren’t!”

“And you haven’t told me why you dumped me on this island instead of taking my bending!” she stands on legs that shake under the kingdom of unfairness she’s been forced to shoulder.

He steps into her space, and later, when she’s calmer, she’ll be proud of getting such a rise out of him, “I don’t punish children for their fathers’ crimes.”

“No,” she leans in and whispers, “You just hide them at the bottom of a hole.”

She sits again, ignores the Avatar with the kind of stubbornness only the innate entitlement of nobility can produce, and feels the brush of the lion turtle’s attention as it skims against hers. She’s not surprised it’s been eavesdropping. And yes, maybe she is insane, but it feels, for the first time, like it’s taking her side.

*

“Please,” Ty Lee had begged, steam from the boiling water below swirling around the tiny gaps between her bound hands.

It was never going to be forever. Azula had known that, despite the white noise in her brain that grew louder every day, the sparking scrapes that sharpened the present moment to a needlepoint while blotting out the one before it and the one that would come after.

It was not a plot she especially liked, not the ending to the story she would have chosen. But she wasn’t under any illusion as to why Ty Lee had followed her. The particular leverage she had pressed her weight against.

She didn’t have the stomach for war, too soft and pink and easily blown about by the wind, a flower petal. Ty Lee _liked_ people, a virtue that would always be at odds with their goals.

There would come a day when Azula would do something the other girl couldn’t abide, use cruelty as too blunt a weapon, and she’d awaken to find her friend had packed away her blush-red clothes and whip-quick fists and slipped in the night.

Another name on the list. The word _Friend_ scrawled under _Mother_ , _Brother_.

She’d been distantly curious about what it would be, just how hard she would have to push, what undefined line she'd have to cross.

She had calculated for a thousand scenarios, starting at the moment under the big top where she set yet another fire, charted out a million potential outcomes.

Just not this one, this single forgotten factor.

Mai was the line Ty Lee would not cross.

“She’s sorry,” Ty Lee’s voice wavered, her eyes shining with the kind of desperation Azula hadn’t seen since her mother’s reflection.

She hadn’t planned for Mai, who had come willingly. No pressure, no coercion. Just a kindred spirit, bored and capable with motives so lax Azula could bend them however she wanted. 

Mai might as well of sliced her open, flicked every hidden blade into skin, sternum to belly, that’s how flayed Azula felt at being so _wrong_.

“I’m not,” Mai growled.

There were no tears in Azula’s eyes, but her vision blurred all the same.

“Gag them,” she ordered.

*

“Come swimming with me,” he invites again the next morning. It’s as much of an olive branch as she can hope for, considering there are so few avenues of apology available. Perhaps it’s the constant reminders that her life is barely moving forward, or just that she’s running short on pride, but she relents.

He strips down to reveal lean muscles wrapped over knobby adolescent limbs, both of them finally skewing closer to adult than child. If he notices her stare, he ignores it, pretending to look at the ground, a tree’s bark, his palms, anything except back at her while she discards her faded shirt and threadbare pants.

She misses well-made, expensive beach clothes. It’s fortunate that she’s been stuck with an Avatar who’s pretty ambivalent about material things. She doesn’t have to bother being embarrassed about her worn underwear when she’s already worked so hard to make peace with her red flames.

Besides, diving into water deep enough to be submerged in feels so good it might as well be happiness.

After a spell of swimming at pace with the lion turtle, she takes a break to let the Avatar drag her along in a manmade current. They’re both splayed on their backs, boneless, two star-shaped dots punctuating the enormity of the sea.

“I guess I forget,” he eventually starts, “that you were dealt a bad hand, too.”

The words drift between them for a long moment, she can almost see them bob atop the swells before slowly dissolving into the ocean’s surface. She was born perfect, she almost argues. Clever and talented and beautiful and royal.

However, she’s forced to admit, none of that stopped her from ending up here.

“Is he a good Fire Lord?” she finally asks.

She can hear the grin in his voice without even looking, “We disagree half the time, but yeah, I think so.”

The sun shines down, heating her skin just as the water cools it, “I guess it could be worse.”

*

The sound of the waves fades first, then the low buzzing drone of the cicadas, then the breeze against the shell of her ears, until all she hears is the deep marching thud of her heartbeat. Meditation, like gardening, she’s discovered, is much harder in practice than she had assumed.

Her father had always spoken positively about it, at least publicly. He talked about the clarity it can bring, the internal calm, the strength of being centered, even though she’d never actually seen him practice it. Certainly, didn’t require it of his children.

She can admit that it was more of a theme than she realized at the time, distracted as she was with conquering half the known world, that her father was something of a hypocrite.

He sat atop his stolen throne and spoke of tradition. Demanded loyalty with the same breath that he banished his wife. Claimed honor and maimed children.

She inhales slowly, unevenly, and forces the muscles in her shoulders to relax as the breath _whooshes_ out again. Her back is still ramrod straight, and her neck feels tight as she lifts one hand to dab at the dew of sweat gathering along her collarbones.

Privately, he probably would have told her it was a waste of time. That she should instead be training or plotting or tormenting peasants or whatever it was she did back then that’s gotten so hard to remember. He’d say spirituality was fine for the masses, but them, with their royal blood that looks exactly the same as everyone else’s but set them so far apart, required force and action.

It takes a few seconds to unclench her jaw, cracks her knuckles without opening her eyes, and tries to steady her heartrate.

He probably mediated all the time now, with nothing else to do.

Not one of the handful of people she’s seen since his capture (and hers) has described Ozai’s cell to her. But it’s not a stretch to imagine- standard Fire Nation prison, nothing special, three walls of stone and one of bars, a window too high and narrow to allow the pleasure of a view.

Did he even bother to make plans? Did he have a list like Azula’s to run through when the darkness of reality crawled into his chest to rewrite his place in history and shrunk him down into something so small it could slip through the bars over his window if only he could reach it? How hard was it to break a weak man? To trap him forever?

Much easier than it was to trap her, her pride murmurs with a glow.

 _You’re still too loud_ the lion turtle complains.

*

A twig cracking and someone cursing softly wakes her in the night. She rolls out of the hut and into a fighting stance, hands already ablaze, only to sag and sigh at the sight of the Avatar standing contritely in the dying firelight.

“Hey, Azula,” he greets her awkwardly, the hand passing over the arrow on his head gives away his discomfort.

It’s only been a few weeks since his last visit, she’s not due more supplies, and when she scans the ground around him, there’s no sack of goods in sight.

“Avatar,” she finally responds, coyly tucking her loose hair behind her ears, “Are you supposed to be here?”

He grins widely, like he can fake his way to normalcy even after showing up at what is, for all intents and purposes, the prison of his oldest enemy for no reason in the dead of night, “Got anything to eat?”

He whines like a baby at the pot of ocean kumquats over the fire until she relents and lets him graze through the garden. She puts the kettle on for tea.

“I was on my way back from the colonies when I heard the lion turtle, thought I’d stop by.”

“Stop by?” she asks incredulously, listening to him rummage around in the dark. She doesn’t have to look at the stars to know he’s veered off course.

He steps back into the circle of wavering light, his shirt hiked up to cradle a bunch of lettuce, a couple tomato-carrots, and a handful of long beans, “Sure, why not?”

She simply raises her eyebrows, spreads her hands out, and gestures to their surroundings.

He plops down across the fire, heating up his hands up just enough to roast the beans, “Appa got tired.”

“Try again.”

He smiles cheekily, “I missed my friend?”

She barks out a laugh, “We aren’t friends.”

He shrugs and merely eats for a minute, watching serenely as she pours the tea, taking the cup from her with a hushed thanks.

“It doesn’t stop, you know?” he says eventually, “People…expecting something from you.”

She never knew what to do with herself, during the strange in-between moments she was waiting for Father to give her an order. Point her in a direction and set her loose. The euphoria of her last success and the terror the next potential failure and there she was suffocating in the middle.

“It gets to be a lot,” he explains.

True, no one else will train with him as fiercely as she does, but she’s suspected for a long time that that isn’t why he stays.

It’s fitting, the place she’s so desperate to leave is an escape for him.

She sips her tea, “You’d rather be here?”

He blows out a deep breath and chuckles, “Do you mind?”

She doesn’t.

*

It’s been a while since it’s rained, the freshwater pools are noticeably emptier. She steps comfortably around him, gathering dead branches for firewood as he pulls and winds graceful arcs of water into the forest, bending the salt into her half-empty sack and funneling the rest into the ponds.

“What do you tell people, when you disappear out here?” Surely he’s not stupid enough to admit the truth, that he trains with his one-time murderer and all around crazy person without a safety net.

“I tell them it’s hard to find you,” he finishes with a lazy twist of his wrist, “But no one really asks.”

At this point, she can read him well enough to spot a lie and isn’t that another ridiculous thing, “Not even your peasant girlfriend?”

He sighs deeply, energy going sullen.

“What girlfriend?” he says a little glumly.

*

“You upset your brother today,” her mother admonished gently, retrieving a comb from the ornate vanity in the corner and perching beside her on the edge of the bed.

“And?”

“ _And_ ,” Ursa untied the ribbon from Azula’s hair, letting it fall in one inky, solid mass to her shoulders, “I bet your friend Mai isn’t too happy with you either.”

“I was right though,” she whispered conspiratorially as her mother carefully smoothed out the day’s snags, idly tracing her fingers along the satiny red thread edging Ursa’s robes. “They _like_ each other.”

Ursa chuckled, “A badgermole could see that, that doesn’t mean you didn’t embarrass them.”

Azula rolled her eyes and pulled away, clambering up to the pile of pillows resting against the headboard, “Good! Liking people _is_ embarrassing.”

“My darling,” her mother sighed good-naturedly, pulling the covers up to her waist, “One of these days you’ll feel the same, and come to understand that liking someone is a lovely feeling.”

The dark place in Azula’s chest that grew whenever she knew she was being lied to expanded an inch, “Does Father make you feel like that?”

Ursa paused, her hand faltering as she started to reach for her daughter, but then stopped. So perfectly still and painfully beautiful and always at war with the monstrous sadness forever lurking in her eyes.

“One day, you’ll come to understand your father, too.”

*

“Did he love us?”

Ursa’s ghost haunts her periphery less and less these days, so Azula keeps her questions lined up, at the ready, the ones that ping around her head while she tries to meditate. Strange things that never mattered enough before to give much consideration. They bounce off the memories she can no longer pretend to forget, all her heat-hazy actions and the consequences that must have followed. They demand her attention, clanging around her brain while the lion turtle’s aura goes tinny with exasperation.

 _In the beginning_ , Ursa’s shadow answers from over her shoulder and Azula swears she feels fingers on her hairline, _I think he did try_.

It’s a less than satisfactory answer, but it’s unfair to expect more from a hallucination. Perhaps just as unfair as asking for more from her father too, after everything he gave her. Riches and titles and power and every single other thing she’s lost. And so she’s left wondering if she has at least one thing that can’t be stripped away.

_But I did, very much._

“That’s not what I asked,” Azula whispers sadly.

*

The breeze that blows over her while she mediates is cold and dry, she shivers hard enough to break her light trance, goosebumps erupting down her arms and legs. She looks up to find a sky cloaked in a thick layer of grey, bubbling clouds where just a moment ago the sun had hung high and hot and blazing.

“What’s happening?” she asks, unfolding quickly and hefting herself up one of the tallest trees to get clear view of the horizon. “Is it a storm?”

Lightning illuminates the from deep inside the haze, giving the impression of unseen depths, of impossible distance. She braces for thunder but it never comes.

 _You will need to be quiet_ the lion turtle warns.

The wind picks up suddenly, clawing at and then ripping the ribbon from her hair. The leaves around her rattle and shake like threatening fists, the trees groan as their roots are tested against the sudden gales.

Another spear of lightning flashes, and for an instant she swears something massive and furious moves in the sky.

“I’m insane,” she reminds herself again, terror falling from the darkness to worm its way into her bloodstream.

She jumps down from the tree clumsily, cyclone air causing tears to blur her eyes only to dash them away.

The mist churns around her, cloaking the forest in a thick, wet haze, static buzzes in her ears, it hurts to breathe. Something roars in the gloom, figures move in the fog. Over the skyline, she half believes she sees a man on a scarlet dragon, red robes flapping behind him as he soundlessly calls her name across the span of years.

She thinks she’s screaming until she tastes blood, realizes the heal of her hand is pressed in between her teeth as she pants. The clouds part enough for the blinding blaze of a comet’s tail to flash across the heavens, scorching spots into her vision.

Pain erupts from her knees as she stumbles and falls, her bloody hand smears across the crystal caverns under Ba Sing Se as she steadies herself.

 _You will need to be calm_ the lion turtle murmurs.

She tries to crawl to camp, but the fog is so thick she can’t see more than the ground below her and her hands as they dig into it. Phantom fingertips rake through the hair whipping around her head, Mai whispers nonsense in her ear.

At long last the thunder rumbles above her, unraveling to vibrate her very skin, but it sounds like her brother’s screams, her father’s laugh, her mother’s sadness. The tears rolling down her cheeks now have nothing to do with the wind.

 _Quiet and calm_ it cautions.

Shadows mutter in ancient tongues her mind can’t decipher but her spirit comprehends. She hasn’t felt this unhinged since the hospital, tries to fold herself into something so small even the wind will ignore it. She swallows frantic breaths that are more than half sobs, closes her eyes, and breathes.

*

When she opens them again, the gloom has lifted. Waves lap peacefully against the sides of her home. The breeze is languid, a warm and lazy thing.

She limps back to camp to find everything in its place, as undisturbed and neat as when she left it. She can almost convince herself she imagined the whole thing, another issue for a truly mad mind.

But that night, when she looks up at the sparkle of constellations, she realizes they’re hundreds of miles away from where they were that afternoon.

*

It’s hard to gauge the progress of a relationship when the giant, immortal, reality-defying creature you live upon hardly responds to you. But if pressed she’d say a wary trust has grown between them. Something inside of her was laid bare as they swam through the Spirit World, and her jailer approved of whatever it saw.

She’s allowed to swim freely now that escape isn’t the intention, dive in a graceful arc off the shoulder and paddle along the side until her arms ache and legs tremble. Large swathes of the shell are too smooth to climb up, any texture worn away by actual eons of waves, but she’s gotten in the habit of leaving vines trailing over the edges. A couple of times, when she was especially weary, a massive paw materialized below her for a boost up the side.

The clouds reflect the same soft pink light as her mother’s cheeks as she floats, both creatures bobbing lazy in a current, her hair a riotous, loose halo drifting around her face and shoulders. Lu Ten’s hand lifts her up.

“Do you know?” she whispers to the creature, “Will I be here forever?”

Her list of goals is summoned, shorter and simpler every time it scrolls through her thoughts. Freedom continues to rest squarely on top but after that…

Of course, she wants to see her father, but it strikes her suddenly that of all the million things she misses, he is not one of them. She may be imprisoned physically, in all the ways that count, but she hasn’t taken an order in so long it’s hard to accept she ever did. What use does she have for a man like him, who needed his wife to win him the throne and his daughter to wage his wars.

 _Forever_ the lion turtle responds sedately _means nothing when time does not move, only you do_

She laughs at that, rubs her finger tips against the glasslike shell, “Might as well be talking to my uncle.”

*

_Visitors_ the lion turtle warns, interrupting her afternoon reading.

An uneven, low gurgle can be faintly heard in the distance. Curiosity is paired with concern as she climbs the highest tree near the starboard edge, peering down until the hull of a submersible, painted vivid blue and green, comes into view.

“Tacky,” she whispers to the creature.

The hatch on top hisses and opens, and two immediately recognizable heads pop out simultaneously.

“I’m being tortured,” she sighs.

The Kyoshi Warrior shades her eyes with one hand and salutes sardonically with the other. The idiot Water Tribesman just crosses his arms and gripes.

In a swift succession of moves, Suki hoists herself out of the vessel, shoulders the supply bag, takes a running leap, and bounds up the side in a few spry hops, hoisting herself at the steepest parts with a vine. She’s barely out of breath when she skids to a stop a stone’s throw away.

“Your boyfriend isn’t joining us?” Azula asks, the words thick with mocking sweetness, dropping to the ground.

“He insists on guarding the sub,” Suki rolls her eyes, before calling out loudly, “ _In case you’re plotting something!_ ”

“I _know_ she’s plotting something,” Sokka’s faraway voice drifts up from below.

Azula holds her hands out of the sack. Maybe she does have an agenda, but it’s simple, direct and instantly formed- get this woman off and away and beyond her sight as quickly as possible.

But instead of tossing it over, Suki grins at her with bright sarcasm, “Lead the way.”

Her baser instincts and ever-present temper can’t believe she hasn’t attacked yet, red fire and all, just to see if this is still an enemy she can best, if there’s an advantage to throw her weight against.

Her teeth grind, and she sets off towards camp.

“You don’t seem happy to see me,” Suki says.

Hot aggravation zips through her limbs, “You’re not my usual deliveryman.”

The other woman shrugs, “Sokka wanted to test the new sub.”

“And you came as his bodyguard?”

Suki laughs and waves a hand vaguely between them, “I came as your favorite prisoner.”

Azula shoulder’s tense, annoyance breaking down into something duller and deeper and harder to define. For the thousandth time she swallows the bitter reminder that she has a fraught history with everyone, absolutely every single person, she knows.

“Oh, don’t make that face, you look like Zuko,” Suki fusses, “Besides, I always took it as a compliment, you had so many to choose from.”

When they reach her camp, they step into the sunlight of the clearing at the same time. Suki drops the pack near the hut’s door as Azula squats by the fire, starts the ritual of making tea for lack of anything else to do with her hands besides violence.

“It’s definitely prettier than Boiling Rock,” Suki says, tone too close to pouting for someone as stoic as Azula knew her to be. She mills around the garden, close enough so they can speak while staying too far for a surprise attack, “Then again, I wasn’t alone.”

“If you wanted to gloat,” Azula snipes, remembering the dim light and dim life at the bottom of her stone cell, “You should’ve come to my last place.”

It’s the natural order of things, victors get to crow over the defeated while the defeated scheme in darkness.

Suki’s mouth twists into something that’s not a frown, not quite a scowl, more confused than anything. “I am gloating,” she admits, “But to be honest, I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I would.”

They lapse into a brief silence, studying one another from opposite sides of the clearing, just the sound of the water in the kettle humming to a boil and the chirp of hidden insects.

Suki looks older, stronger, more balanced, but that’s not what Azula fixates on. It’s the symmetry of their relationship that is hard to ignore. Not the obvious - one winner and one defeated. Captor and captive. Playing parts so interchangeable it hardly mattered who was on top as long as the scales were balanced.

It’s been too long since Azula’s looked in a mirror, and it catches her off guard to recognize her own reflection in pieces of the other.

Two girls, born half a world apart, smart and gifted and battle-tested, forced to choose their roles long before they were old enough to know what that meant.

“Do you need anything?” Suki asks after a long moment. “Are you alright?”

Azula scoffs, pulling the kettle from the fire-pit. That question used to tighten the barded tendrils creeping through her chest, but now it simply exhausts her, “Did my brother tell you ask that?”

Suki smiles humorlessly, “He worries. He’s annoying when he worries. A real grouch.”

“I’m fine-“

“Look,” Suki cuts in, “I don’t like the idea of relying on anyone for anything either, especially men. I won’t even tell him, if that makes you feel better.”

“Because you care if I feel better,” Azula scoffs, pouring herself a cup of tea.

“Only because it bothers you,” Suki makes a quick, dismissive gesture. She finishes her circuit of the camp and mills slowly closer to the fire, kneeling cautiously across from her.

“You’re a terrible host,” she observes.

“You’re not my guest,” Azula spits but makes another cup of tea anyway. “Why are you still here?”

Suki accepts the cup carefully, blows on the surface of her tea. She gives a half nod, half shrug, “Aang can be so optimistic, you know? I needed to see if he’s telling the truth when he says you’re behaving yourself.”

“I can hardly get into any trouble out here.”

“That’s the idea,” Suki quips.

The tea scalds her tongue, she thinks about Katara’s face as Aang fell, “Does it even matter?”

Suki hardens and for a moment they’re back in that cell together. Her voice is hushed but steal sharp and just as heavy, “Are you sorry for what you did? Any of it?”

Azula drinks again, the tea is still too hot.

“No.”

She stares past Suki and into the forest, past every rock, root, and furrow she now knows better now than her own face and into the echoing, empty palace hallways, cold and flat and suddenly so unwelcoming.

“But sometimes, I can’t remember _why_.”

Suki’s gaze is unrelentingly steady, but her words tremble the tiniest bit, “You still have no idea, do you? What you even want.”

They trek back together in a tense silence, the distance between them carefully measured, while Azula reconstructs their history. Each step is a drop of bad blood, a blow exchanged, a curse screamed into the wind that always went unanswered. When they hit the tree-line again, the Water Tribesman is still glaring from up from the hatch.

“Paper, maybe,” she concedes in the end, “Ink and a brush. To write my uncle.”

Suki nods, one corner of her mouth curving thoughtfully, “Just so you know, you’re my favorite prisoner, too.”

Azula rolls her eyes but finds herself shaking the other woman’s hand anyway, Sokka squawking ridiculously below. Suki hops over the edge, bounding swiftly to the submarine with steady control and simple joy. It reminds her of both Mai and Ty Lee at once.

Instead of the realization scraping against the sides of her chest with searing, jagged rage, it strikes Azula that in a different time, a simpler world, a better father, they may have been friends.

*

A shadow on the horizon darkens and solidifies into a misty spit of land. That isn’t unusual in itself, they often get close to islands, definitely within sight, possibly within screaming distance, before the mammoth paws of the lion turtle return them to open water.

The current drags them around the reef that surrounds the speck of an island and she scurries to set up her drag nets, when the distinct, subtle jolt of the lion turtle paddling into a turn stops her. She checks in with the position of the sun before she trusts that it’s really steering them closer to the beach.

She jogs towards to head as they come to a stop a few dozen meters off shore, hops on bare feet down the shell and leaps nimbly to a boulder half-submerged between them and solid land.

“What’s wrong, why are we stopping?”

Its massive head rises just enough to reveal amber eyes, seawater sloshing in choppy waves _We’re resting_

“You sleep? You haven’t before.” They’ve been traversing the seas together for just over three years and the entire time it’s indescribable pressure in the back of her mind has never wavered.

 _You’ve been too loud_ the lion turtle explains.

She peers over her shoulder to the island. She calculates how quickly she can build another boat, if she can navigate it past the reef, if the beast could catch up to her if she escapes from the opposite side of the island.

Freedom, a word that means so much without meaning anything specific, hangs at the top of her list.

She’s lost count of how many times the Avatar has asked her what would come after, so many that her refusal to answer has become knee-jerk, habitual. She’d just assumed it was because the truth was still the very reason she was hidden away.

But if she doesn’t miss father and the shine of the crown has dulled and her family can’t trust her, what comes after? If she wins at the long game, what exactly is her prize?

The sun begins its initial descent behind them when she turns back, remembers that the garden needs watering.

“Help me up please,” a gigantic, dripping paw boosts her gently into the trees. The presence in the back of her mind quiets.

*

She’s no fool though, she can see this island sojourn for what it is. It’s possible the lion turtle does need to rest, but this is also some kind of reward. A privilege, like swimming, granted due to good behavior.

It’s a strange kind of accomplishment. Her jailer trusts her to not attempt an escape, even though she assures herself she could.

Father would scream at her if he knew. For going soft, growing complacent, hiding out in the middle of nowhere instead of sacrificing whatever she still has to help him, a man who never earned a single thing on his own.

It’s easier to be satisfied with what you have than he would have led her to believe.

“What more did he need?” she asks, but her mother’s shadow has no answer.

She spends one night on the soft sand of the island’s beach before returning to camp on the lion turtle’s back. As much as she appreciates the space, the fresh water stream, variety of fruit trees, new terrain to memorize, she has trouble sleeping without the nearly imperceptible motion of it seesawing on the waves. And maybe she just likes being close to it.

“I could bring you a hammock,” Aang offers the first time he finds her there.

He stomps his foot and instantly erects a deep three-walled shelter along the edge of the jungle, facing out to the water.

She shrugs and makes a careless, non-committal noise, instead pointing to a spot just beyond the lean-to, “There.”

The Avatar ticks a finger and a fire-pit carves itself out of the soil.

“Do you want me to clear some space for a garden?” he asks lightly.

“No,” she frowns, “No, I’ll do that myself.”

*

A stab of uncertainty slices into her guts at the sight of the red and scarlet balloon on the horizon. In a brief moment of panic, she wonders if it’s possible to wake up the lion turtle and ask who’s coming.

Logically, she knows it won’t be her brother, he’s too busy and too important to waste time and risk his safety, but that doesn’t stop the hitch in her gut that’s both disappointment and relief when a long braid whips above the woman as she drops. Ty Lee lands lightly on the sand below, the pack slung across her torso familiar.

Azula’s gaze flicks back up at the airship for a handful of heartbeats, in case more figures appear. But no, the other woman has come alone. She considers ignoring her, forcing Ty Lee to search her out, but it would be a pointless manipulation, simply prolonging the inevitable. Besides, it probably wouldn’t even bother her.

“I might be insane, but I’m not unreasonable,” she assures herself as she clears the tree-line.

“Azula! Hi!” Ty Lee’s greeting is nervous and high-pitched, oozing with unsteady goodwill, “Look at you! You live at the beach!”

Azula rolls her eyes and holds her arms out in tacit permission, “Oh go ahead, if it’ll calm you down.”

Ty Lee gives her upper body a few carefully placed jabs, nothing that immobilizes her, just enough to turn her arms into heavy noodles. But it seems to put them both a bit more at ease.

They walk side by side down the coastline, hopping nimbly over the trail of half-submerged boulders to the lion turtle while Ty Lee chatters about nothing important- a dress she had made, an unwed couple caught kissing, the new way the palace cooks are folding dumplings. A light fare of topics, neutral and vague, updating her on stories previously written about. Azula doesn’t have to do much to keep the conversation moving, peppers in a few ‘mhms’ and ‘ahhs’ to let her know she’s still listening.

“It’s so cute!” Ty Lee gushes when her home comes into view, tugging gently at Azula’s wrist. She waits for the swell of humiliation, but it never comes.

The threat of shame constantly dogged her heals in the palace, but solitude has turned it into something pointless.

She points Ty Lee towards the nearest pool with the kettle while she unpacks the bag, there are a few scrolls, a bag of fire flakes, a romance novel about star-crossed lovers, the paper and ink she requested from the Kyoshi Warrior. More ash bananas.

She tosses Ty Lee a bag of green tea as she returns to the fire. Her meandering commentary flowing on uninterrupted. She starts in on her family, giving a brief update on each sister as if Azula ever bothered to learn their names, as Azula cracks open each scroll. They’re all from her uncle.

“How’s Mai?” she breaks in.

Ty Lee’s motions pause in her periphery.

“She’s never written,” Azula explains with a small nod to the letters.

“Oh?” it sounds like a question but Azula knows better.

“I’m surprised you didn’t drag her along today,” Azula feels phantom hands in her hair.

Ty Lee shrugs, adjusts the kettle with care, and says with a lightness that doesn’t fit, but an honesty that cuts, “You were gonna kill her, Azula.”

When she looks at Ty Lee full on, the other girl gazes at her with the same straightforward honesty her uncle has, the kind Azula once misread for weakness, “You would’ve killed both of us.”

It’s true. And just because she’s decided against thinking too hard on that part of her steep decline doesn’t make it less real. She’d spent so long being wounded by their betrayal that she forgot all about how she planned to punish them for it.

Azula turns away, pretends to read Iroh’s drivel, swallows around a dry throat, “Yes, well. I’m quite past that now.”

She doesn’t really mean to say it, perhaps Ty Lee’s reflexive transparency is catching.

They sip the tea in silence and Azula forces herself to envision Mai dead in a reality where she never stopped winning. Always got her way.

Removed by time and space, it’s odd imagining Mai’s absence as a permanent thing. That she would have wondered where exactly Mai was and known the answer was nowhere.

It made sense at the time, she’s so sure it did, but now her rationale is impossible to retrace. She has to wonder which of the thoughts that crossed her mind back then were reasonable and which everyone just treated like they were.

“You’re really not angry at us anymore?” Ty Lee sits back on her feet, stares at Azula carefully. “You’re not still mad?”

 _Mad_ is a complicated word.

“I’m mostly just…” the sentence trails off as she gestures to the hut around them with leaden arms. Bored? Sad? Tired? Lonely?

“Quieter.”

*

She lets Ty Lee hug her on the beach as the war balloon materializes on the horizon.

”I’ll come back soon,” she promises. But promises are weak things, Azula knows. Like people. Very breakable.

She raises her fists with an apologetic smile, “It was a condition…you know…for letting me come alone.”

Azula scowls and steps into the shade of a palm. The compromise is harder to swallow when it’s not her idea, “Fine.”

Knuckles hit her thighs, hips, and shoulders with more force than before, and Azula crumples to the ground.

Ty Lee gives her forehead a quick kiss since she can’t avoid it and grins sunnily, “I’m really glad you’re better, Azula.”

She waves overhead, a rope is dropped, and Azula’s watches her friend return to the world.

*

“Am I better?” she asks her mother later that night. A log on the fire cracks and sparks etch nonsense patterns through the darkness.

What, exactly, was wrong with her before?

No one answers.

*

The squirrel toads chitter irately and scamper out of the way as she vaults herself through the jungle’s canopy, dodging water whips and icicles that precedes the Avatars unrelenting pursuit.

She grabs a vine that she can only hope is sturdy enough to bear her weight, uses it to swing in an arc back until they’re side by side in the branches, shooting off a rapid series of fireballs that he has to drop to the ground to avoid.

“Cheater!” he calls sourly as she sprints away, laughing wildly all the way to the beach.

Later, he sprawls across the sand, grey eyes made black by the moonlight, and watches her intently as she combs her hair, “Are you alright?”

“Of course,” she scoffs through a sudden smile, “Same as always.”

He hums thoughtfully. “It’s just today you fought like…” he blushes, “like you didn’t actually want to kill me.”

She’s already killed him once before and nothing good came of it. Even when he leaves, and she can only wonder where in the great wide world he is, she likes that the answer is _somewhere_.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she tells him decisively.

*

Her bedroom felt larger than it should. The whole palace did. Surreal and stretched out, the straight lines of the walls distorting at the ceiling, the corners sinking into deeper shadows, all the endless empty spaces growing ever emptier.

It didn’t make sense, that one body could take up so much space that its absence was felt everywhere.

She stared at the mirror, statue still as she sat at her vanity, eyes critical as they tripped over her face, her fine clothing, the topknot. The longer she looked, the harder it became to make sense of what she saw. When her gaze flitted past the reflection, her black hair and rigid spine were someone else’s.

The eyes that peered back weren’t hers either. Too shiny, too distant. Too terribly sad.

The hinges behind her whined faintly as the door opened part way, just enough for a slim figure to pass through.

“Why is your servant-girl crying in the hallway?” Mai asked, sounding barely interested. She padded near silently to Azula’s back, but even those footsteps turned to drumbeats in her mind.

Azula snorted, gesturing stiffly at her topknot, “She’s useless and I told her so.”

“Hm,” Mai responded, “It looks fine to me.”

“It’s not,” Azula husked, turning her head to one side, and then the other appraisingly. A sudden stab of anger was immediately swallowed up by the darkness in her chest. She wrested the tie free, grabbing up the comb again, “It’s not how she- “

She stopped short, her quick inhale was almost painful, her lungs too tight, her hands didn’t feel like her own.

“It wasn’t perfect,” she finally finished.

“Let me try,” Mai murmured, her hand appeared in Azula’s line of sight suddenly enough that she jerked away, flinching.

“I can do it myself,” she hissed.

Long fingers, firm but gentle, reached around her shoulders to pry the comb from Azula’s hand.

“I _know_ that,” Mai said with more feeling than Azula thought she was capable. When she finally met her eyes in the mirror, she expected the same anger as her father or emptiness as her brother or the poorly hidden pity that swam through everyone else.

Instead, she just saw Mai, calm and present and aware and knowing. As comforting as it was terrifying, she saw someone who knew her.

“Let me try,” Mai repeated simply. And Azula let her.

*

Momo chatters overhead, swinging low to gobble up the stray gnats buzzing through the undergrowth. With one hand she shades her eyes, tries to pick the bison out among the thick clouds.

She grins as a giant blue arrow emerges, checks her reflection in one of the closest pools, and puts the kettle on.

“Avatar,” she calls when they touch down in her clearing, waving a casual hello. Her smile dies as Aang hops silently down, a tightly rolled scroll gripped in one hand. His face is the face of the Avatar, not a friend.

How long had those been different things?

“Princess,” he murmurs, holding the paper out to her.

He never calls her that.

“Is someone dead,” she quirks an eyebrow and breaks the royal seal, it’s been so long since Zuko wrote.

Aang purses his lips together and swallows uncertainly as she begins to read, “The opposite actually.”

Her brother writes about traveling, about the past, about the night their grandfather died. He tells her that time and perspective and his friends have offered clarity, that they both let her down, he understands her anger now.

The longer she looks at the letter, the less sense it makes. At first reading she was sure it contained words, but the sentences all turn to nonsense, the symbols unrecognizable. All except one.

_Mother_

“He found her.”

Her sight goes blurry, her eyes feel wet.

“She came back to the palace with him.”

There’s a strange wisp of a wail leaking from her throat, the same one her mother muffled with her pillow at night.

“Hey, look at me,” Aang reaches for her wrists, the paper crushed between her palms, between their chests. A curl of smoke rises from it.

“She wants to see you.”

At that the letter bursts into bright red flames, a quick and violent ending.

“If you bring her here, I’ll kill you,” it’s not true, she’d long past the urge even if she could manage it. But after a moment, he nods solemnly like he believes her, smooths her hair back gently.

She can’t stop the fire that jumps off of her as he holds her, carmine flickers catching on vines and climbing into tree branches and spreading onto the grass below. She doesn’t have to look to trust he puts it out.

*

“You think I should forgive her,” the accusation comes unbidden, she’s not even sure if he’s awake.

There’s a moment of tense silence before he rolls onto his back, profile illuminated in the moonlight, “I think…you’re more like her than you want to admit.”

She lets out a strangled sound, just as outraged as hurt, but he only shrugs, gestures towards the stars like an explanation is there, “You’re both women who’ve made some pretty big mistakes.”

*

“Did you forgive me?” she asks, but not until he’s a speck in the sky and the morning sun is blinding her.

*

It’s unlikely that she’d drift past the reef and into deeper water, but she loops a vine around her chest anyway, tethering herself to the lion turtle’s side.

It’s consciousness brushes against hers, like a sleepy murmur, someone rolling over without waking, and she hums to herself as it settles again.

Meditation is still a struggle, but it comes most naturally like this, bobbing on the waves, fingertips slipping along and mapping the smoothed imperfections on the shell. The clamor in her brain recedes. It allows relatively linear thoughts to form, guides what’s purposely been forgotten back to the surface. There are so many questions she didn’t have the time to ask her mother’s shade, they crash against the memories she’s unsure she can trust.

She remembers that her mother used to call her things like _rascal_ and _mischief-maker_ and _so willful!_ with exasperation and a tired smile, combing her fingers through Azula’s hair while she sat at her feet.

Azula would rub her fingers, still chubby and clumsy with childhood, along the stitched edges of Ursa’s heavy robes, lulled by the murmurs, the ritual actions of the women around her. She watched in awe as servant-girls brushed her mother’s hair into a glossy, midnight curtain. Pulled it into an elegant half knot, strands falling in proper order, cheeks and lips dabbed to soft pink glow.

Azula has no idea if it’s normal, looking back on those hushed moments, if every girl spends their childhood thinking her mother is the pinnacle of beauty, perfection personified, feeling a mixture of jealousy and adoration and resentment all at the same time.

Whether she intended to or not, it seems she has always been chasing the perfection she was convinced could only be found in her mother, just as she had recklessly followed her father’s hunger as it led her to the ends of the earth. Caught her whole life swinging between the two.

But now, the distance separating them all much more than just miles, whose daughter is she?

She does not miss her father. She can’t yet forgive her mother. And she has no idea what word comes after _freedom_.

She rinses the salt from the ocean off in the freshwater stream running through the jungle, everything calm and quiet and shady in between the long tawny rays of sunlight. When fingers comb through her hair, they finally feel like her own.

She once measured time by the weight of her hair. Measured herself by the perfection of it.

But it’s gotten so long, too heavy. It tangles and catches and weights her down.

The little knife, with its roughhewn handle and cloudy blade, slices some of the length off easily.

She thinks about burning it, the fire waiting inside twists at her summons, one hand instantly gloved in rose gold flames. She tosses the hair into the stream instead, and watches as the current carries it out to sea.

*

“I need something,” she feels awkward with him for the first time, is still so unpracticed at the simple art of wanting something and then having to ask for it.

She hands him a letter, the one she’s been writing in her head longer than she can remember but just managed to put to paper. He blinks at the name scrawled across the front, smiles softly.

The idiot.

*

Her hands feel stiff and uncoordinated as she combs her hair. She forgoes the top knot, letting muscle memory guide her as she pulls it into a simple ponytail.

The red balloon on the horizon lowers enough for Ty Lee to leap down sprightly in the morning light. Azula’s throat clutches as a second figure appears behind her, vaulting out like an unspooling ribbon of red robes and black hair.

She hasn’t felt this nervous in years, perhaps ever, waiting in the clearing that now constitutes her whole world, fingernails digging into the old scars on her palms.

As the duo arrives, Ty Lee has enough awareness to wave but lingers at a distance.

“I got your letter,” Mai says.

*

Ty Lee strips down to her underthings and sprawls like a cat deer in the sun, humming breezily to herself while Mai and Azula settle in the shade, peeling the mound of soaked mung beans piled between them.

Mai’s voice is a bit brittle when she begins, “I was surprised you wanted me to come.”

Azula did once incinerated a couple square acres of forest at the mere mention of Mai’s name, so she concedes the point, “I’m glad you did.”

Mai waves a casual hand, jet hair glinting blue, “I’ve never been able at say ‘no’ to you.”

Azula scoffs, fidgets with the hem of her pants and thinks _liar_.

“Not always.”

“You said you weren’t still mad about Boiling Rock,” Mai’s expression tightens as she flicks a pill bug from her skirt dismissively.

“I’m not -“

“Hurt then,” even sitting Mai can still stare down at her and Azula resents her mother for not passing on more of her height.

“You left me,” her voice wavers.

“You threw me in jail,” the words are bitten out. “As soon as I stopped being scared of you,” they might as well be on that Ember Island beach again, still lugging around all the same pains of childhood. “So don’t pretend I left you just because you can’t admit you’re _sorry_ about it.”

She’s pretty sure she’s not, though. Sorry. Not in the way everyone seems to be waiting for, doesn’t even know how to get started. She did so much- set a million fires and betrayed a thousand trusts and gleefully twisted every arm she could until she got whatever she wanted. To begin to be sorry for even one of those things feels like the first loosening rock of an avalanche.

Her mother would probably let the guilt suffocate her. Father would just set more fires.

She takes a deep breath, grips her newfound quiet, finds the sanity she had to replant along with the garden.

She won’t apologize if she doesn’t mean it. Instead she aims for something that’s closer to just telling the truth, “I guess it could be worse.”

*

“How’s my brother?” Azula banks the fire so Ty Lee can safely retrieve the kettle. “His letters hardly say anything real.”

“Fine,” Mai deadpans.

“Totally fine!” Ty Lee chirps, “He was sad for a while when Mai broke up with him, but he seems really happy with his new girlfriend.”

The fire flares briefly and Ty Lee jumps with a start. There’s a beat of charged silence before Azula parrots sharply, “ _Broke up?_ ”

“You didn’t tell her?” Mai gripes at Ty Lee who is suddenly absorbed in pouring the tea.

“Since when?” Azula demands.

Mai leans against the hut wall, adjusting her loose sleeves with cool aplomb, “Pretty long time now. Around the same time as the Avatar and Kat-“

“Please tell me Zuzu’s not with her,” Azula panics.

Mai scoffs. Ty Lee shakes her head, “A nice Earth Kingdom girl, from when he was away.”

Azula’s rolls her eyes at the unnecessary euphemism for banishment, before fixing her stare at Mai again, “Are you alright?”

After years of everyone asking her that question, it’s surreal to be the one speaking the words as if she would know what to do with the answer.

“Of course,” Mai looks as unruffled as ever, “Seriously. Can you imagine me as Fire Lady? Popping out little, well-behaved Fire Babies?”

“But…” Azula argues, “You loved him.” _You chose him._

Mai shrugs as Ty Lee hands them their cups with an affectionate smile.

“You don’t have to want what you wanted at fourteen forever,” Ty Lee declares with the profound, simple honesty that’s only hers.

*

“Have you seen her?” Azula asks. The evening is cool as they slowly walk to the beach. The balloon has reappeared, growing to block out the sunset, a giant floating representation of the massive gulf between their very separate islands.

Mai answers with a short _mhm_ as the black, hard packed jungle floor transitions to sand, “Once, right after she came back. She wanted to talk about you.”

 _Did she look perfect?_ Azula refuses to ask, _Did she seem sad?_

“It was a short conversation,” Mai cocks an eyebrow, “I’m not good with mothers.”

“I know,” a short giggle bursts from her.

They pause while Mai toes off her shoes to match Azula’s perpetually bare feet, and they stroll along the tree-line as Ty Lee swings through the branches ahead.

“You’ll have to come back someday,” Mai continues, “You can’t hide from her and Zuko out here forever.”

She almost laughs at that, a thousand arguments teetering on the tip of her sharp tongue. She could say, _it isn’t that simple_ or _that’s not my choice_ or _who says I’m hiding?_

But it’s the piece of her that’s the quietest, the calmest, that demands to know _Can’t I? Can’t I stay here forever, sheltered and insane, never given another order, never have another thing taken away?_

She wonders again about how heavy Aang must feel. The strength it takes to lift not just himself, but the overwhelming weight of the Avatar’s spirit and the expectations of the entire world along with it. The brief moments of freedom he’s stolen and hoarded in the unbroken span of her years tucked far away, safe and alone.

Maybe it is that simple.

But what she ends up saying is, “Do you want me to come back?”

“I don’t think anyone, not my parents or Ty Lee, definitely not Zuko, has ever known me like you do,” Mai confesses, “You have to know, even after everything, that I’ve really missed you.”

It’s the most vulnerable thing Azula’s ever heard her say, but it doesn’t seem to cost her anything to say it.

“How could I? You’ve never even written,” she accuses.

“Get real,” Mai rolls her eyes, reaches out to smooth down a wisp of hair that’s escaped Azula’s ponytail. The motion blocks out the sun and the balloon with it, and for an instant Azula can pretend she has no idea where, on the vast face of the planet, they are. “Who did you think packs those bags?”

Azula’s head jerks up in surprise, holds Mai’s gaze as the other woman allows the barest hint of a smile, “Like Zuko remembers you love ash bananas.”

*

Sunlight trickles through the canopy in clear bright ribbons as she hums idly to herself, gathering fruit, wild greens, pockets some seeds for the garden.

Out of the peace a faint pressure unfurls in the back of her mind, gives the impression of stretching in the morning. She feels more than hears a low rumble in the distance as the lion turtle awakens.

 _Time to move on_ it beckons.

She runs her fingers over the bark and leaves as she makes her way back home, “Yes, I suppose it is.”

*

The season is turning again, the days getting shorter and the water in her ponds cooler. Normally they would begin to make their way north, hug the constantly warm seas of the equator, the familiar path and the constellations that guide it etched into her mind’s eye. But she has no idea what the lion turtle will do this time around.

She is sure to be gentle as she digs out a few of her plants, carefully lays the wispy roots into her chipped teacups. She presses soil around them with a sprinkle of water and places them in an uneven pyramid in her emptied salt sack.

Aang keeps his distance while she works, murmuring softly to his bison, patting it lovingly on the snout. He only glances over to her when she finishes and sets off without a word into the forest.

She picks her way slowly through the trees, past every rock, root and furrow she’s come to recognize as her own face, down to the water’s edge.

Her dreams are still blue, but as she dives in, she thinks it’s of the ever-shifting color of the ocean and nothing else.

A few strong kicks and she’s submerged just far enough to find a bottomless golden eye in the depths.

 _Will you miss me?_ she asks.

The eye blinks and a gigantic paw rises to lift her back into the sunlight.

 _Only the sound of you_ it answers as she laughs.

*

She expected to dislike the feeling of flying again. The furthest she’s been in from the ground in years is the top of the island’s tallest tree.

But the bison’s saddle is wide, and it glides up and up with steady control, the wind streaming past her a cool breeze that catches on her ponytail. After a while, she feels confident enough to crawl towards the head, gazes over Aang’s shoulder at the sparkling expanse of the ocean meeting the paralyzing breadth of the sky.

The stars aren’t out yet, but she feels confident that she knows exactly where she is. As she stares, she knows where the first smudge of land will appear. It will spread across the horizon, growing darker and larger as they near. The pale strip of a beach will come into focus, the verdant green of the jungle behind it. And on the white sand, she’ll be able to make out tiny, distant figures. Her friends, her brother. Maybe, she hopes, her uncle will have made tea.

“You never did tell me why you didn’t take my bending,” she reminds Aang.

He shakes his head, chuckles, “I didn’t need to.”

He gives her a look like somehow her words have proven him right about something, “Tell me about what you’ll do now.”

Her lips quirk into a half smile and she rolls her eyes, “The little pond, the one with the turtle ducks. I think it’s a good place for a garden.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Review please!


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